Category World News

Spain and Portugal have regained access to electricity after one of Europe’s worst blackouts paralysed transport systems, disrupted mobile communications and postponed medical procedures.

For almost a day from Monday to early on Tuesday, tens of millions of people were plunged into darkness. In major cities like Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon, people were trapped in lifts, stuck on trains and unable to access the internet.

Meanwhile, queues snaked outside the few supermarkets running on backup generators as people stocked up on dried goods, water and battery-powered flashlights.

The Spanish and Portuguese governments quickly convened emergency meetings after the outage, which hit Spain and Portugal about 12:30 (10:30 GMT) on Monday and also briefly affected southern France.

Almost no one in the Iberian Peninsula, which has a population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout. Madrid was forced to declare a state of emergency.

Although power has been largely restored, transport remains in dire straits, with trains and flights reporting delays. No firm cause for the shutdown has yet emerged.

With the power back on, attention is turning to what caused such a widespread failure of the region’s networks.

What caused the power outage?

Portugal’s electricity provider, Redes Energeticas Nacionais (REN), said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.

REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’.”

The Portuguese prime minister, Luis Montenegro, also said the issue originated in Spain.

However, in a statement on Tuesday, Spain’s national meteorological office, Aemet, appeared to rule out the weather as a culprit.

“During the day of 28 April, no unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena were detected, and nor were there sudden variations in the temperature in our network of meteorological stations,” Aemet said.

The Spanish government said the cause of the power cut is still unknown and warned against speculation.

“My gut feeling is that multiple factors were behind the blackout,” Kang Li, smart energy systems chairman at the University of Leeds, told Al Jazeera.

“It usually takes several months for forensic grid data to be properly analysed,” he added, “though an interim report could be done in several weeks.”

Bloomberg News reported that Spain has seen a record number of hours with negative power prices in recent months as more wind and solar energy supplies the grid. Until now, however, oversupply hadn’t led to blackouts.

In 2024, renewable energy sources accounted for 56 percent of all electricity used in Spain, a record high. By 2030, that proportion is expected to reach 81 percent.

According to Li, “it’s harder to manage energy output when infrastructure is changing so quickly. A higher penetration of renewables with existing systems creates more fluctuation in the operating system.”

For his part, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said, “We have never had a complete collapse of the system,” explaining how Spain’s power grid lost 15 gigawatts, the equivalent of 60 percent of its national demand, in just five seconds.

While there’s no evidence yet of a cyberattack, Sanchez said he isn’t ruling anything out. He warned against speculation but said “no cause can be discredited at this point”.

Could a cyberattack have caused the blackout?

Although investigations into the cause of the outage are ongoing, Portugal’s National Cybersecurity Centre threw cold water on the idea of foul play, saying there was no sign that the outage resulted from a cyberattack.

Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro also said there was “no indication” of a cyberattack.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels, Teresa Ribera, an executive vice president of the European Commission, also ruled out sabotage. Nonetheless, the outage “is one of the most serious episodes recorded in Europe in recent times”, she said.

For now, the Spanish government said it is waiting for more information on the cause of the blackout. State officials said they hope in the coming days to know what the cause was.

Which countries were affected?

Spain and Portugal were the worst affected, but outages occurred elsewhere too:

• Spain: Urban centres such as Avila, Madrid, Murcia, Galicia, Alicante, Zaragoza, Barcelona and Seville reported widespread disruptions. The Canary and Balearic islands were not affected.
• Portugal: Lisbon and Porto experienced comparable challenges.
• Southern France: Parts of the French Basque Country saw brief power outages. But officials from the French electricity transmission network said the interruptions lasted only a few minutes.
• Morocco: Some reports suggested internet providers in Morocco struggled briefly to keep their services running because of network connections with France and the outages there.
• Greenland: Remote regions of Greenland lost access to key satellite services, including internet and telephones. Authorities said they own satellite equipment in Spain although a direct cause has not yet been established.

Has power been restored?

By mid-afternoon on Monday, Spain’s electricity operator, Red Electrica (REE), said it had started to recover voltage in the north, south and west of the country.

The recovery process was carried out gradually to avoid overloading the grid as generators linked up. Power also returned to Portugal bit by bit. By Monday night, REN said 85 of its 89 power substations were back online.

By Tuesday morning, power had almost fully returned to Spain and Portugal.

At 6:30am (04:30 GMT) more than 99 percent of energy demand in Spain had been restored, REE said. Elsewhere, power was restored overnight to 6.2 million of Portugal’s 6.5 million households.

At the city level, Madrid’s metro system said service was restored on all but one line by 8am (06:00 GMT), meaning that 80 percent of trains were operating during Tuesday morning’s rush hour.

Has Europe suffered from blackouts of this scale before?

While outages are not unheard of in Europe, the scale of Iberia’s power failure was one of the largest in recent history.

In 2019, England and Wales suffered regional blackouts amid lightning strikes at a gas-fired power plant in Bedfordshire and an offshore wind farm off the east coast of England.

A 2006 German power overload caused outages as far away as Portugal and Morocco. In 2003, a problem with a hydroelectric power line between Italy and Switzerland caused an outage across Italy for about 12 hours.

“Interconnection between countries has positive benefits as it can improve efficiency and reduce costs. … It’s always sunny or raining somewhere in Europe,” Li said.

“But”, he added “interconnected systems mean that local faults in one location can have domino effects elsewhere. Transmission lines can become overloaded.”

Li also pointed out that climate change and rising temperatures pose “increasing risks” for Spain-and-Portugal-style blackouts.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is holding a rally in Macomb County, Michigan, a city well known for its automotive industry, to celebrate his first 100 days in office.

He signed more executive orders in just over three months than any other president, sent tariffs into the world, and remained steadfast to his America First policy, with the exception of Israel.

Al Jazeera examines some of his biggest decisions in terms of numbers:

How did he exercise his executive powers?

The American Presidency Project estimates that Trump has signed at least 142 executive orders in his first 100 days in office, which is more than any other US president.

The president issues an executive order to federal agencies that is legally binding without the approval of Congress.

Trump signed 26 orders on January 20th, including pardoning more than 1,500 people who had been found guilty on January 6, 2021, Capitol riot charges, resigning from the World Health Organization, and changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

Trump’s executive orders have focused on both energy and trade as well as border security and immigration.

How many people received pardons?

After losing the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2018, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people, including his supporters who were found guilty in connection with the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road dark web market, was among the other notable pardons that were being served with money laundering and drug trafficking.

DOGE layoffs and cuts

Trump signed an executive order on January 20 that gave the tech henchman Elon Musk the authority to reduce government spending.

According to figures released on the website of DOGE, the organization is estimating that it has cut about $ 160 billion from the federal budget, or 8% of the $ 2 trillion that Musk had initially pledged to save.

DOGE reported that the Department of Health and Human Services has had the biggest budget cuts, with the Department of State and Agency for International Development having had the biggest budget cuts. However, these figures have faced criticism because they lack sufficient proof.

At least 121, 000 federal employees have been fired, with about ten thousand of those at the Agency for International Development (USAID), where the majority of the jobs were sacked, according to CNN’s data. The organization Trump initially targeted, and it has since been almost completely disbanded.

Tariffs and the economy

Trump’s administration has put in place a flurry of tariffs to, in his words, lower the US trade deficit, address unfair trade practices against the US, re-establish manufacturing jobs, and generate income for the US government.

Trump imposed 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods, including a 10% levy on Canadian energy, and a 10% tariff on Chinese goods starting on February 1.

Trump placed tariffs of 25% on auto imports in the weeks that followed, as well as steel and aluminum. Trump had imposed a 1% import tariff on goods from the rest of the world by April.

The 145 percent tariff rate was the highest for China. However, some exceptions have been made to technology-related goods like smartphones.

According to Bloomberg News, Canada and Mexico are subject to 25% tariffs on goods that violate the trilateral USMCA trade agreement, which affects $ 63.8 billion in trade.

A 20 percent tariff rate has been suspended for the European Union.

What has the market done lately?

Trump has shocked the markets since taking office, largely as a result of his market-stability-causing, uncertainty- and volatility-causing, flip-flopping tariff announcements.

All major indices have declined since the November election, despite an initial spike:

• S&amp, P 500 – down about 3.3 percent
• Nasdaq is down 4.5 percent or so.
• Dow Jones is down 5.3%.

The markets have fallen even further since the day of the inauguration:

• S&amp, P 500 – down about 7.9 percent
• Nasdaq is down about 12.1 percent.
• Dow Jones is down 8.9%.

Which world leaders accompanied Trump?

At least 11 world leaders have been hosted by Trump in his first 100 days in office.

Unsurprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was the first leader to visit on February 4th. Trump stated that he would make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East” during this visit.

Among the world’s leaders who have visited Trump are:

• Netanyahu on February 4.
• Shigeru Ishiba, the prime minister of Japan, on February 7.
• King Abdullah II of Jordan on February 11
• On February 13, Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, announced
• Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, on February 24.
• On February 27, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced.
• On February 28, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, will visit. The US withdrawing military aid from Ukraine was the result of the heated exchange between Trump and US Vice President JD Vance on one side and Zelenskyy on the other.
• On March 12, Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin
• On April 7, Netanyahu spoke for the second time.
• Nayib Bukele, president of Salvador, on April 14.
• Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, on April 17.
• On April 24, Jonas Gahr Store, the prime minister of Norway, addressed.

Stance on the Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen.

Trump has stated that he still supports the America First policy since taking office.

Trump has criticized the size of US spending under former president Joe Biden, arguing that Europe should bear more of the brunt. Trump halted all military aid to Ukraine on March 3, drawing sharp criticism from allies in Europe. To try to put an end to the fighting, the Trump administration has held numerous meetings with Russian and Ukrainian officials.

Trump’s proposals to retake control of Gaza and redevelop it have been widely denounced in the Middle East because they suggest the ethnic cleansing of 2.3 million Palestinians. His administration has continued to send US bombs to Israel, including 900-gram (2, 000lb) bombs, bolstering US support for Israel without wavering.

At least 2, 392 people have been killed in Gaza and 105 have been killed in the occupied West Bank since Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Additionally, about 3, 000 people have been pulled from the rubble or died from wounds brought on by Israeli attacks.

The US has significantly increased its military presence in Yemen with attacks on Iran-backed Houthi rebels elsewhere in the Middle East. The March 15th operation, whose purported goal is to stop Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, reportedly launched.

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), at least 207 US attacks were reported in Yemen between March 15 and April 18.

Trump: Has he kept his word?

Trump made at least 75 promises during his election campaign in 2024, including those that included releasing the 2021 Capitol Hill rioters.

With its MAGA-Meter, the Poynter Institute-run nonprofit PolitiFact has been monitoring Trump’s promises. Trump has broken one of his promises, stalled on four, and is working toward fulfilling 23 of his promises, according to its scorecard. The remaining 41 promises have not yet been rated.

In his first 100 days in office, United States President Donald Trump invoked archaic immigration laws, questioned judges’ power to rule against his decisions and attempted to end several legal immigration pathways.

Trump began laying the groundwork for his immigration plans long before his January 20 inauguration.

For years, Trump and his allies have said falsely or without evidence that the US is being invaded by immigrants who are driving up crime rates and that foreign countries are sending their prisoners and mentally ill people to the US.

Several Trump administration officials also said courts cannot and should not rule on Trump’s immigration actions because they deal with national security and foreign policy issues. In doing so, Trump “is seeking a lack of accountability to do things that the law otherwise prohibits”, said Matthew Lindsay, a University of Baltimore law professor.

The Trump administration’s use of national security or foreign policy as a shield against judicial overview is a stark difference from other administrations, Lindsay said.

We talked to lawyers, historians and criminologists to examine the false narratives and spin propelling Trump’s immigration policies in the first 100 days.

Trump’s case for an ‘invasion’ leads to mass deportation efforts

In 2018, during his first term, Trump described a caravan of thousands of immigrants walking towards the US southern border as an invasion. Many of them were expected to request asylum in the US. Constitutional law experts say that what legally counts as an invasion is an armed attack by militaries or paramilitaries.

Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!

During the 2024 presidential campaign, as immigration reached historic highs during Joe Biden’s presidency, Trump began tying the invasion narrative to one of his signature policy promises: Mass deportations.

“I will stop the migrant invasion, and we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” he said at an October rally.

Ten days later, at another rally, he said: “We will not be occupied. We will not be conquered. That’s what they’re doing. This is an invasion into our country of a foreign military.”

So Trump upon taking office issued an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border. In two other directives, he described immigration as an invasion.

One of the laws he eventually invoked – the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – lets the president detain and deport people from a “hostile nation or government” without a hearing when the US is either at war with that country or the country has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” an invasion against the US.

“This is a time of war because Biden allowed millions of people, many of them criminals, many of them at the highest level,” Trump told reporters on March 16. “That’s an invasion. They invaded our country.”

The Alien Enemies Act has been used only three times in US history, each during wartime.

In February, the State Department designated Tren de Aragua – a gang that formed between 2013 and 2015 in a Venezuelan prison – as a foreign “terrorist” organisation.

In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelans whom he said were Tren de Aragua gang members who had “infiltrated” cities across the country. They were sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

They were deported without due process; the government didn’t present evidence of their gang membership before a judge and the migrants weren’t given the opportunity to defend themselves. CECOT is the largest prison in Latin America and has been decried for human rights abuses, such as torture and lack of medical care.

Trump broadly portrays immigrants as criminals, but the data says otherwise

Trump has repeatedly said that countries – namely the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Venezuela – send people from prisons and mental hospitals to the US. He has not cited evidence.

“We were elected to clean up the mess of this country, and we had millions and millions of people come in who were criminals, who were murderers, who were everything you can imagine,” Trump said on April 21. “Drug lords, drug dealers, they came in from prisons and from mental institutions. And I was elected to move them out.”

The immigrant crime narrative drove his successful presidential campaign. Vice President JD Vance pointed to Haitian immigration in Springfield, Ohio, cherry-picking from limited statistics to say immigrants raised the number of murders. In addition to targeting Springfield, Trump said Tren de Aragua took over Aurora, Colorado.

To support its deportation efforts, the White House said Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who the US government said it mistakenly deported to CECOT, is an MS-13 gang member. The administration has exaggerated findings from earlier judges on his case and highlighted tattoos that don’t correspond with MS-13.

Criminologists who study potential links between migration and crime say despite some high-profile crimes committed by immigrants, they commit crimes at lower rates than native-born US citizens.

The Marshall Project found no link between crime and migrant arrivals from April 2022 to May 2023 in New York, Chicago, Washington, DC and Denver, after Texas Governor Greg Abbott began busing immigrants into those cities. The Marshall Project’s 2024 report looked at policing data in cases involving crimes such as robbery, murders and shootings.

A 2018 national study by University of Wisconsin and Purdue University sociologists found that increases in the immigrant population in the US are associated with significant decreases in violence. The study analysed violent crime from 1990 to 2014, examining the association between changes in undocumented migration and violent crime at the state level in all 50 states and Washington, DC.

A National Institute of Justice study of Texas Department of Public Safety data from 2012 to 2018 showed undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes. Researchers separated arrest data for crimes committed by undocumented immigrants from data for crimes committed by documented immigrants and native-born US citizens.

Trump said in an April 25 Time magazine interview, “We have crime rates under Biden that went through the roof, and we have to bring those rates down. And unfortunately, those rates have been added to by the illegal immigrants that he allowed into the country.”

Contrary to Trump’s statement, FBI data shows that violent crime dropped during Biden’s presidency.

“People are like, ‘Crime is out of control.’ Well, actually, crime is not out of control right now, but the perception is that it’s out of control,” said Charis Kubrin, a criminology, law and society professor at the University of California, Irvine.

“It’s very easy to turn and blame immigrants, because those stereotypes have long existed and because it’s sort of this natural ‘in group, out group’ approach that people take.”

Kubrin said Trump’s misleading claims about immigrants and crime have led to policies based on faulty assumptions that don’t exclusively target people with criminal convictions.

The New York Times reported most of the 238 men deported to El Salvador have neither criminal records in the US nor documented links to Tren de Aragua.

Kubrin said misleading perceptions of immigrant crime can harm immigrants.

“Other consequences include increased hate and hate crimes against immigrants and against racial and ethnic minorities who may resemble immigrants, like Asians and Hispanics, but are not immigrants themselves,” Kubrin said.

Trump officials ignore separation of powers when saying courts have no authority on immigration policies

Like previous administrations, many of Trump’s immigration policies have been challenged by lawsuits and halted with temporary restraining orders.

Trump and his officials have dismissed the constitutional division of powers among the legislative, executive and judicial government branches. At times, they’ve said the courts have no role to play and that judges who don’t agree with Trump should be impeached.

After a federal judge ruled the Trump administration could not deport Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, White House adviser Stephen Miller said, “A district court judge has no authority to direct the national security operations of the executive branch.”

Trump’s “border tsar” Tom Homan said, “I don’t care what the judges think.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described the judge’s order as having “no lawful basis”, saying “federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs.”

Legal experts say federal courts have the power to review and rule on the constitutionality of the president’s immigration actions.

“There is absolutely nothing about an immigration policy that, by virtue of the fact that it is an immigration policy, insulates it from judicial review,” Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina professor of jurisprudence, said.

The executive branch has broad discretion over foreign policy matters, but that doesn’t mean that cases that deal with foreign policy, including immigration cases, are off-limits for the courts, Mary Ellen O’Connell, University of Notre Dame law professor, agreed.

Rick Su, a University of North Carolina immigration law professor, said, “The Trump administration appears to be arguing that just because foreign affairs is involved, the administration does not have to follow the law at all, that whatever they do is the law, and that the courts cannot exercise any jurisdiction over what they do.”

But courts haven’t ruled “that the law or judicial review does not apply to an immigration decision … just because foreign affairs is involved”, Su said.

Labelling immigrants who entered the US via legal immigration programs as ‘illegal’

The Trump administration has said Biden abused his executive powers when he created certain programmes that let people temporarily enter or stay in the US legally. Vance also framed it this way during the campaign, falsely saying the beneficiaries of the programmes were “illegal immigrants” because the programmes were illegal, in his view.

Leavitt said people who entered the US via humanitarian parole programmes and eventually received Temporary Protected Status “came here for economic reasons, and they illegally entered our country”.

Humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status give people temporary legal authority to live and work in the US, immigration lawyers said. When those protections expire or are terminated, people’s immigration status reverts to what they had before these protections. Neither parole nor Temporary Protected Status directly leads to US citizenship.

The Trump administration has tried to end these protections before their expiration.

Kristi Noem, Trump’s homeland security secretary, tried ending Temporary Protected Status for certain Venezuelans. Courts have temporarily halted the termination. The department is not extending the programme for Afghans and Cameroonians and cut it short for Haitians. TPS for Haitians is now set to expire on August 3, six months before the original deadline.

The department also tried ending the protection of people with humanitarian parole under the programme for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. But a federal judge temporarily halted the move on April 14.

Judge Indira Talwani said the humanitarian parole programme beneficiaries complied with the available immigration processes.

“As lawful parolees, they did not have to fear arrest for being in the United States, were permitted to legally work if they received work authorisation, and could apply for adjustment of status or other benefits while paroled into this country,” Talwani wrote. “The immediate impact of the shortening of their grant of parole is to cause their lawful status in the United States to lapse early – in less than two weeks.”

Maria Cristina Garcia, a Cornell University history professor and migration expert, said some immigration changes are happening “quietly at the bureaucratic level”, such as the denial of visas, while others were “announced with great fanfare”, such as the suspension of refugee admissions.

Canadians are informed that US President Donald Trump is “trying to break us,” thanks to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s victory in the election. In his trade war, Trump threatened to make Canada the nation’s 51st state. He also targeted the Canadian economy.